A Reading Life

Watching Wallender

I’d been looking forward to watching the Swedish version of Wallander on Saturday evening on BBC 4 and there was a lot to enjoy. I love the setting: the rolling landscape, the coastline and the old parts of Ystaad. It’s beautifully filmed. The acting is excellent. Krister Henriksson is a fine actor and though he wasn’t orginally my idea of Wallander – Rolf Lassgard’s much closer in my view – I have come accept him in the role. There were lots of nice moments in last Saturday’s episode – I like the way Wallender slipped into English for a ‘not in front of the children’ moment with his daughter and granddaughter. And the ending when we realise the extent of his illness is poignant. And yet and yet . . . as the story reached its climax and Linda, Wallander’s daughter, is menaced, I found that I was actually a little bit bored. And that was the problem: the stories in these last three episodes haven’t really been up to scratch. They all unfolded pretty much as one would expect and didn’t surprise or grip me. Is it there is so much crime fiction on the TV these days that it is hard for writers to come up with something original? Or am I a jaded viewer? It might be so. I think only the first episode, ‘A Troubled Man,’ is actually based on a Henning Mankell novel, so maybe the answer lies there.However I’ll still be watching the last three, not least to see how they handle Wallander’s memory loss and how they wind up the series.